Join us for the 14th edition of the Interspeech Conference in Lyon, 25-29 August 2013.
Experience the largest international event in the field of speech communication sciences, in a wonderful venue and area at the heart of Europe.
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Discover special features of the Interspeech 2013 edition :
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Dear colleagues,
Bienvenue à tous !
It is an immense honor and a great pleasure for us to welcome you to Lyon, France, for the 2013 edition of INTERSPEECH, the world's largest and most comprehensive conference on Spoken Language Processing science and technology.
Speech is a fundamental human activity : it runs across biology, medicine, psychology, sociology, anthropology and ecology. It is central to the organization and the development of human health, personality and intelligence. It is also essential to the synergy within human groups and their relationship with their environment.
Quite naturally, linguistics and engineering sciences play a central role in the scientific and technological areas covered by the conference : speech production and perception, phonetics and phonology, speech analysis and synthesis, automatic speech and speaker recognition, etc…
But many other disciplines provide additional viewpoints to speech as the keystone of communication, cognition and interaction in human societies and play an important part in research progress on topics such as spoken language acquisition, speech and hearing disorders, speech in multimodal dialog interfaces, spoken information mining and retrieval, etc… The conference thus promotes an interdisciplinary approach covering all aspects of speech science and technology, ranging from fundamental contributions to practical applications, in a wide variety of areas and dimensions.
INTERSPEECH conferences are held under the umbrella of ISCA (the International Speech Communication Association). A few years ago, a strong desire emerged from members of AFCP (Association Francophone de la Communication Parlée, the French-speaking regional branch of ISCA), to prepare and host a future edition of INTERSPEECH in France.
Lyon was favored, given the leading scientific and economic activity in the city and around (Grenoble, Geneva, Paris, Aix-en-Provence, Avignon, …), especially in the fields of health and humanities, and the existence of a remarkable infra-structure for large conferences : the Lyon Convention Centre. In accordance with the local scientific specificities, the special focus of the conference was defined as : “Speech in Life Sciences and Human Societies”.
Since the approval of the project by ISCA, the perspective of hosting INTERSPEECH 2013 has created wide enthusiasm within the French and French-speaking community (and sometimes even beyond) and many energies have converged towards the project, leading to the following partnership :
- INRIA (Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et Automatique), a government funded research institution, acting as the general coordinator and financial back-up of the conference, and providing invaluable administrative human support and experience from various services (event organization, financial department, legal matters, computer equipment, logistics, …)
- The University of Lyon as the local organizer, who has been closely monitoring the on-site implementation of the logistics, actively promoting the conference to the local authorities and industrial partners and efficiently liaising with other regional institutions.
- AFCP who has provided the bulk of the Organizing Committee by involving members from a wide range of laboratories and universities across France and the French-speaking community.
- Europa Organisation, the PCO of the conference, who has been in charge of key logistic tasks such as registration, information and contact with participants, website updating, etc…
- A team of approximately 50 volunteers, who have accepted to dedicate some of their time to help on site throughout the conference to ensure a smooth progress for each step of the event.
INTERSPEECH 2013 will consist of 4 plenary talks by internationally renowned experts, 50 regular oral sessions, 9 special sessions (3 single and 3 double), 30 poster sessions, 3 show & tell sessions, 6 tutorials, an exhibition, and no less than 13 satellite workshops. By its expected number of attendees, this year’s conference is bound to be a record-breaking edition. And we would like to thank our public and industrial sponsors for their generous support to the event.
But organizing INTERSPEECH in 2013 in France is also some sort of return to one’s roots for the speech research community : the first edition of the EUROSPEECH conference was held in Paris (France), under the umbrella of ESCA (the European Speech Communication Association), in 1989, about one year after the association was created, and its statutes deposited in Grenoble, only 100 km away from Lyon, 25 years ago.
Since then, ESCA has become ISCA, EUROSPEECH and ICSLP conferences have merged into the yearly series of INTERSPEECH conferences, which regularly attracts 1200 or more international participants from various scientific backgrounds : the definite proof of a lively community and a wonderful success to celebrate together this year, through ISCA’s silver jubilee.
We do hope that you will enjoy a fruitful and productive conference and that your stay in Lyon will be the opportunity to positively experience many aspects of the French way of life.
Frédéric Bimbot - General Chair
Cécile Fougeron, François Pellegrino - Co-Chairs
